God of War Ragnarök review (no spoilers) – one of the best games I’ve ever played
Ragnarök is full of moments that take you by surprise, and a few that’ll make your jaw drop.
Greek stories were derived from an oral tradition, passed around like campfire tales. To make them easier to follow, the narrator would focus on a single time and place, telling a story with a clear beginning and end – generally from the viewpoint of a single protagonist.
And so it was with God of War 2018, which told the story of Kratos, a Greek god hiding among the Norse, in a single cinematic shot. It was a stylistic choice that mimicked those old Greek tales, but the method had some drawbacks. For a series known for pulling the camera way back to take in grand boss battles with literal giants, the more focused camera work only gave you a narrow viewpoint of a much bigger world, like looking into the ocean out of a submarine’s porthole. The Norse gods were there somewhere, plotting away in the background, but you barely got a sense of them. God of War Ragnarök puts them at the forefront.
It still tells its story, for the most part, without cutting the camera away, but its focus isn’t always on Kratos. Hidden cuts and a roaming camera allow the game to tell a much richer story and go deeper into the side characters than in Kratos’s more intimate PS4 debut.
The cast has more than doubled for this sequel, and each of the characters – including background characters – has a fully developed arc, and you’ll care about most of them. Make no mistake, this game boasts some of the best writing in triple-A video games. Even throwaway lines while out roaming the world can make you laugh, make you think, and hit you like a punch in the gut. I was almost bawling within the first 30 minutes. It’s often touching and occasionally profound, which sounds ridiculous when you remember this was originally a series about an angry bald man who punched gods to death.
Of course, it’s not just the writing that makes it. Christopher Judge is astonishing as a more reflective, caring, but still dangerous Kratos; Sunny Suljic is convincing as a young Atreus looking to find his place in the world; Ryan Hurst is quietly menacing as Thor, who is built like a strongman and walks into scenes belly-first; Richard Schiff surprises as an Odin with the charisma of a cult leader; and Danielle Bisutti’s turn as a vengeful Freya is almost guaranteed to win all the acting awards this year.
The last game was a simple story where Kratos and Atreus were on a mission to scatter his wife’s ashes on the highest peak in all the realms. Every time you thought you were close, something delayed you. Here, that’s not the case. Your objective changes throughout the story, and you always feel like you’re progressing toward something, rather than being blockaded.
Outside of spreading the ashes, God of War also put the focus on Kratos preparing his son for the world by teaching him to close his heart to pain, prioritize his own safety, and fight well. Ragnarök reveals the truth – Kratos wasn’t the one doing the teaching. As well as developing a few more head wrinkles, Kratos has grown as a person in innumerable ways thanks to fatherhood – he can even read Norse now! – and he grows even more over the course of this story, in which he learns to give Atreus some independence.
This theme is reflected in battles and traversal. Instead of carrying Atreus on your back when you scale a cliff, you stand aside and let him chart the path. In battle, he gets in close and smashes enemies with his bow before slipping away and letting loose with arrows. He’s a capable fighter now and is generally much more helpful. He doesn’t feel like he’s only an extension of Kratos. He doesn’t even call him “Boy” anymore.
Combat works largely the same, allowing you to switch between your frost axe and flaming chain blades at the touch of a button, but Kratos feels more mobile, thanks to grapple points and the ability to jump and slam down from heights. Everything is weighty and raw, with a slight camera shake and an almost imperceptible time dilation helping to sell the fantasy of each blow.
I don’t know what it is, but something Sony Santa Monica has done with the timing of everything makes combat flow so much better. Slip dodges and double tap rolls can cancel almost any move, and Kratos steps around the battlefield with surprising grace when you master the timing of it all. One optional late-game battle, in which I had to time my dodges, blocks, parries, and shield slams while chipping away at a large health bar, felt like a FromSoftware boss and took as many attempts to defeat. If you play it as a button masher, you’re missing out on a surprisingly tight combat system.
One of the biggest complaints around the first game was a lack of enemy variety. That’s been addressed here, and then some – in fact, I was still finding new enemy types 32 hours into the game. Fans of the old God of War games definitely won’t be disappointed when it comes to the boss battles either. There are a lot of them, and they are a proper spectacle.
There’s also more… let’s call them combat styles, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you. Just trust me when I say: they’re brilliant additions. Like much of the game’s big reveals, they’re better discovered for yourself.
Ragnarök is full of moments that take you by surprise, and a few that’ll make your jaw drop. For the first few hours, it feels a bit like a retread, but then it takes all of your expectations, freezes them into an ice block, and shatters them into a thousand pieces. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. I didn’t think anything could topple Elden Ring for me in 2022, but here we are.
Even the optional quests are worthwhile, to the point where, despite loot being way more meaningful this time around, I found myself doing the side quests, first and foremost, just to see what happens. The way these optional objectives interlink and overlap, allowing you to dip in and out, complete a bunch at the same time, or get sidetracked by something else entirely, is masterful.
It’s a joy to explore all nine realms of this striking and varied world. Green algae rivers and rich forests. Desolate, windswept deserts, and freezing glaciers. Volcanic mountains, waterwheel villages with pumpkin patch houses, and a sun-baked oasis. These are just some of the locations you’ll see on your travels, and you’ll even revisit some of the previous locations, albeit changed by Fimbulwinter. The Lake of the Nine? More like The Ice Rink of the Nine.
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Speaking of the past, Kratos is much more willing to reflect on it here. People who played the last God of War in isolation probably didn’t get much of a sense of the man Kratos was before he fled to the land of the Norse. Ragnarök sees him open up and come to terms with it all. He breaks his chains.
I adore God of War 2018, but this is a far better game in every way imaginable. Just be careful out there – it won’t be long before the fireside stories start and every surprise in the game gets spoiled for you by someone on Twitter with an anime avatar. Mute the words now and go in like Kratos’s axe: cold.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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